Yo Yo

It was the day the music almost disappeared. Musician Yo-Yo Ma forgot his $2.5-million, 266-year-old cello in the trunk of a taxi Saturday, but police tracked it down at a garage in Queens in time for his evening concert. "I did something really stupid," Ma said sheepishly after he got the instrument back. "I was in such a rush, I was so exhausted, I'd given a concert at Carnegie Hall last night. I just forgot."

The yo-yo team members leaped out of a Los Angeles Public Library minivan and quickly started their routines. To the sound of guitar surf music, the Golden Apple Corps boys twirled and swirled yo-yos around their heads and under their legs, demonstrating challenging tricks like the Sleeper, Around the World, the Hydrogen Bomb and Splitting the Atom. More than 100 boys gathered Tuesday morning in the yard of Aggeler High School to watch the yo-yo demonstration.

The school auditorium is a dizzying whirlwind of spinning disks on this Sunday afternoon. A hundred boys with baggy shorts flick yo-yos from their fingers with ease, toss them under their legs, fling them up in the air and twirl them behind their backs. The colorful toys spin, flash and twirl in a frenzy of atomic energy.

When Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello while Mark Morris performs his choreography, who's the accompanist and who's the dancer? The answer proved anything but obvious Friday when Ma made music on the left side of the stage at the Irvine Barclay Theatre at the same time as Morris and his 18-member company performed two splashy recent dances in the center. It would be nice to report that the event represented a starry collaboration of equals--but it didn't.

No, Mark Morris is not going to play the cello, and Yo-Yo Ma won't don a leotard. But they will offer a unique collaboration this weekend in sold-out performances at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Dancer-choreographer Morris and cellist Ma normally appeal to separate constituencies. Tonight, they pool their drawing power with Ma performing in accompaniment to the Mark Morris Dance Group. Ma will play scores by Bach (for "Falling Down Stairs") and Lou Harrison (for "Rhymes With Silver").

Two more hours, and 15-year-old Paul Wiancko will open his cello case, which is bedecked with fuzzy dice and peeling stickers from places like Pedros taco stand and rock station KLOS-FM. Two more hours, and with cold hands in a temperate theater, Paul will play for Yo-Yo Ma, the world's most famous cellist, a 12-time Grammy Award winner. In a way, Paul plays for Ma every day--Ma's picture is tacked to the wall he faces when he practices at home in San Clemente.

A recital of three of Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, as took place Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, is emphatically not what leaps to mind as the centerpiece of a gala fund-raiser. After all, power players cum arts benefactors aren't necessarily musical cognoscenti who thrive on such lofty fare. Bach's tunes in these suites might be hummable, yet they also provide heady underpinnings for Platonic ideals, conveying less sentiment, more the height and depth of human experience.

Through a massive, multidisciplinary video project, Yo-Yo Ma has been reconsidering Bach's six cello suites over the last five years. The films and attendant recording are out now, and Ma is touring in support of their release. On Thursday, he settled at the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church for a mountaintop performance of Suites 1-3 (with Suites 4-6 scheduled for Friday), presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.